On 12 September 2011 21:28, Harry Mitchell <hjmitchell(a)ymail.com> wrote:
I don't know how much use postcards, even
Wikimedia postcards, would get,
but some of the Commons POTYs would be great for that kind of thing. How we
get past "look at the pretty picture" to "upload your own", I'm
not sure.
In my (relatively limited) experience, it's not the smallest sizes that are
left over! ;) What else makes a good platform for advertising Commons?
Some "mosaic" Commons postcards (possibly from WMDE?) were floating
around at Wikimania, and were very popular - well, they vanished fast,
anyway. In my experience, a lot of people take these to be pretty
pictures to put somewhere rather than to use as postcards qua
postcards, which is fair enough, but perhaps we could capitalise on
this.
If they're not actually using the back, we don't need to leave it
blank - so why not pre-print it with a message?
Some options:
a) a quick guide to uploading to Commons, in two or three steps.
b) ditto for creating an enwiki (or other project) account.
c) a general introduction to free content.
d) the story of the image.
The latter requires careful research and selection, but is potentially
very impressive if we do it right -
"This picture of a sycamore was taken on June 2008 by Maria, a German
Wikipedia editor in Munich. Since then, it's been used to illustrate
48 articles in 36 different language editions of Wikipedia, where
it's been seen well over four hundred thousand times. It's used in
over a hundred other websites as a stock photograph, and has appeared
in a magazine and a children's schoolbook."
- and it should be fairly easy to follow that with a message of "you
can really contribute something worthwhile"!
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk